WARNING: This gem is currently under active development, and is not yet stable. Use at your own risk.

This gem aims to combine the extensibility of the URI class — its design supports adding new and custom URI schemes, with the open and read semantics of the OpenURI standard ruby module, and aims to greatly expand the list of URIs that can be read.

Eventually this gem might also offer ability to write data to the URI.

As much as possible, we wanted to extend the existing OpenURI interface:

require 'super_uri'

contents = URI([String]).read

URI.parse([String]).open do |file|
  #...
end

The key to this gem is the large selection of the URIs that can be provided and instantly used to read data. Let's take a look at a few examples:

require 'super_uri'

URI('env://HOME').read
# => "/Users/"

URI('file:///usr/local/etc/hosts').read
# => "127.0.0.1    localhost\n...."

URI('redis:///1/mykey').read
# => "keyvalue"

Future versions might allow writing and deleting of the data:

# 
URI('file:///usr/local/etc/hosts').write(data)
# => 23425
URI('file:///usr/local/etc/hosts').delete
# => true

URI('redis:///1/mykey').write('keyvalue')
# => 8
URI('redis:///1/mykey').delet
# => true

This gem was born out of the desire to easily read and write data via a large number of ways during development of another gem — sym — which performs symmetric encryption, and needs to read the private key and the data, and write the result (and sometimes the private key). After running out of flags to pass indiciating how exactly the private key is supplied, I had an epiphany — what if I can just use one flag with the data source URI?

There are two high-level steps required to create a unified way of reading/writing various resources:

1. One must define the syntax for describing how to access it
2. One must implement the actual read/write code for each supported syntax.

The most natural fit for 1 seems to be the URI module. It can be easily extended by design, and already supports many schemes out the box. In addition, a popular OpenURI extension adds the open call to http[s], ftp, and ssh protocols, partially providing #2 for these schemes.

However, OpenURI only supports a few protocols, and does not currently support delete operation.

The approach we take is to extend URI with the schemes with support, and fulfill them using Handlers that can be easily added.

The following types are planned to be supported:

URI('env://HOME').read
# => /Users/kig

URI('redis://localhost:6379/1/firstname').write('konstantin')
# => 'OK'
URI('redis://localhost:6379/1/firstname').read
# => 'konstantin'

URI('redis://localhost:6379/1/operation').run(*args)

URI('scp://user@host/path/file').delete

Suggested possible ways of accessing local and remote data:

URI('string://value').read
# => "value"

URI('env://PATH').read
# => "/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin"

URI('stdin:/').read
# => data from STDIN until EOF

URI('shell://echo%20hello').read
# => "hello"

URI('redis://127.0.0.1:6397/1/get,firstname').read
# => 'konstantin'

Similarly, we could read data from:

memcached://127.0.0.1:11211/operation,arg1,arg2,...
scp://user@host/path/file        
postgresql://user@host/db/?sql=<sql-query>

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'super_uri'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install super_uri

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake spec to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/kigster/super_uri.

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.